


Fallen Kites

by dustbunnyprophet



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Bad coping mechanisms, Bipolar Disorder, Character Study, Depression, Eventual Romance, Freeform, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M, Manic Episode, Mental Health Issues, Promiscuity, Underage Drinking, YOI Shit Bang 2017, it's gonna be a rough ride, nothing too graphical, reckless sexual behaviour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 22:14:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11953746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustbunnyprophet/pseuds/dustbunnyprophet
Summary: Yuri was soaring like a kite, burning like a star, speeding faster than his thoughts could follow. He was on top of the world.Six months later he was ready to crash. A hollow shell, moving with no will of his own. And just when he thought he would get used to this sluggish emptiness, the flicker of restlessness flared back to life.And he was back at the start, climbing higher and higher, until the air was so thin there was nothing but the long fall back.Two years in the life of a manic depressive.And all the life that followed.





	Fallen Kites

**Author's Note:**

> This is my entry to the [YOI Shit Bang 2017](https://yoi-shit-bang.tumblr.com/).  
> It comes in pair with this amazing [artwork](http://dustbunnyprophet.tumblr.com/post/164856496701/the-companion-piece-to-fallen-kites-posted-with)
> 
> BEFORE READING:  
> This fic deals with mental disorder in a realistic way. I understand that most of its contents might be triggering. Please consider this before reading. I tried to tag accordingly, but I may have missed some. Feel free to drop me a comment if you think I should add a tag (or twenty). 
> 
> <3

 

I.

It began in a club.

Yuri had gotten back from Japan a few days before, and his mother was not home. His mother was never home. The apartment was empty, so silent he could hear the whirring of the fridge in the kitchen. And he hated it. There was nothing to distract him. Nothing to quench the need to move, to act, to speak. He would have settled for anything, really. Because standing there, perched on the armrest of the sofa, waiting for a miracle felt like losing his mind. There were just so many thoughts pushing, pulling. Impressions from his impromptu trip to Japan, the anger and resentment towards Victor, the strange mixture of emotions Katsudon elicited in him, part awe part disgust.

His mind was like a crucible of thoughts speeding faster and faster, and the itch to move was pulling at his skin. He wished he could go to the rink and skate it all out, to carve it into the ice and get rid of, spilling it like sweat beads. But it was Saturday night and the doors would be already bolted, the janitor having locked on his way out.

He scowled, looking at the dark corner of the living room, where the orange light of the lamp could not reach, and he wondered if he could just jump into it, into the darkness of the spring night? Could he wade through it? Would it be better than being here, stuck, pinned, nailed to this one spot when everything inside him begged to _move_?

He could go outside, he could go into the light chill of the night and just walk. But that would not be enough. No, he needed to move, to jump, to spin, to let all of this energy out.

Oh.

It was a sudden idea, but Yuri was already jumping off the sofa before he had the time to even form it properly. It was night.

Saturday night.

He yanked his t-shirt off and dropped in on his bed, opening his wardrobe and pulling out the outfit he had worn for Mila’s birthday. If it had fooled the bouncers before, it was sure going to work now. Excitement rippled under his skin as he got dressed, and he found himself grinning maniacally in the mirror. He grabbed a handful of hair and pulled it in an artfully messy bun.

He was moving, he had a goal, he had a challenge. But above it all he was going to dance, to jump, to spin, and burn burn burn this restlessness.

Just thinking about it made him grin.

 

It took him three attempts to get into a club. Yuri had nearly given up and scowled back home when the bouncer of the third club he tried entering let him through. He strode in before the scowling guy changed his mind. The loud beat of the music wrapped around him, and Yuri could feel it thrum inside his chest.

It felt fucking fantastic.

There were dozens of bodies moving under the strobe lights. He took a moment to breathe it all in. And then he stepped on the dance floor.

It felt like flying and drowning at the same time. It was like disappearing, like the music pulled at every single nerve ending in his body ripping him apart and rebuilding him in the shape of it. It was the same painful rebirth he did over and over again on the ice, but where skating had grace to it, a flow of movements, this was rougher, almost bruising in the viciousness of the moves. There was no controlled delicacy, no figure, no prescribed set of motions. There was only the music and his body thrashing against it, embracing it, fighting it. It was sweaty, it was dizzying.

Yuri danced and danced, bobbing his head, swaying his hips, jutting them harshly, pumping his fists. The music was beating inside him. It was heady. When he staggered towards the bar, Yuri was feeling drunk on music.

It was pumping in his veins. And he chased it with the burning of vodka.

A couple of drinks later he was back on the dancefloor, letting himself go. Opening the floodgates and feeling all the restless energy wrap around his muscles. He abandoned himself to it, to the sway of his hips, to the sweat dripping down his back, to the heat of movement. He danced and danced and danced. Alone. And then with the faceless bodies around him. Pushing, pulling, grinding against them.

An hour later, he was kneeling on the bathroom floor, head bobbing as he swallowed the length of one of the guys he had been dancing with. There were fingers in his hair, gripping, yanking, and he increased the pace, not really sure what he was doing but liking the sounds he elicited. Feeling them deep inside him.

A shudder and there was the bitter taste of cum on his tongue.

It began in a club.

He was fifteen and he liked it.

 

 

II.

It was a club once again, but this time there were no blowjobs or messy grinding, or fucking on the backseat of a car before getting a ride home. It was a club but Yuri was not looking for a hook up. He was looking for his friend. His _friend_. It was still hard to believe that Otabek, who rode a bike and DJ-ed, that he was Yuri’s friend.

There was excitement rippling under his skin. It was the familiar restlessness, but better better, because he had was feeling close to bursting with happiness. He was like the burning fuse of a dynamite, except when he burst it would be a supernova, it would swallow him whole and it would be good. Better than skating, better than dancing, better than grinding against a sweaty body, better than feeling hands move under his shirt, better than having his hair pulled back while he got pounded, feeling his body growing more and more taut with each thrust. No, being here, was something else entirely, because he was waiting for his friend, his friend!

It fuelled him, making him grin while he bounced his feet in tune with the music. It pumped him, giving his wild energy an edge of exhilaration that made him feel like he was on top of the fucking world.

 

 

III.

He had skated to Welcome To The Madness, and nothing had felt more appropriate. Yuri was under no illusion, there was something fundamentally skewered in his brain. It had always been, but as his body had begun to change it had grown stronger and stronger. And in the gloom of the Russian winter Yuri felt it inside him. Like the slithering of hands. Of all the hands that had raked over his skin. He could almost touch them, sweaty, sticky, groping, pumping, pushing him open, making room, stretching him until he could be pounded into. Fucked like a whore.

Yuri stared at the dark window and the dark city beyond, and the endless endless night of the fucking winter, and he felt like his skin was coated in filth. He felt disgusting, gross. He wanted to peel it off, all of it, rip it away and bleed bleed bleed until it all poured out of him, all the shit, all the filth.

It was a struggle not to move, not to scratch his skin off with his nails. His fingers dug into his palms, while his breathing came out in sharp huffs. He felt like he was about to jump right through his filthy disgusting skin, pressure building higher and higher with each laboured breath. He squeezed his eyes shut. It was not the first time he had felt this dangerous whirlwind of emotions, but it had never been so strong, so fucking overwhelming.

The sudden sound of Lilia’s voice was grating, but so fucking welcome. She was calling him sternly to dinner, and Yuri swallowed the instinctive _Fuck off_ which dripped from the tip of his tongue. But when he opened his clenched fist to turn the knob, it hurt. Grimacing he looked at his palm, only to see four deep indents, nearly bleeding.

Scowling, Yuri stormed out of the room and down the stairs.

Fuck this.

Fuck this all.

His palms throbbed, but he gripped the banister. Hard. And it felt good. It felt like a tiny bit of pressure was let out. The tiniest bit. But it was something.

That night he dug his nails into the muscles on his thighs.  And it felt fucking good.

 

 

IV.

Nationals had almost turned into a fucking disaster. Yuri was just so tired, so fucking drained he barely thought about what he was doing. His body was skating on autopilot, and he didn’t really care. It was  the middle of the season, he had three more competitions before the season was done, and each of them more challenging than the former.

It was the wrongest possible moment to feel fucking weary.

 

He got gold by the skin of his teeth.

 

 

V.

Otabek waited for him in Boston, eager to spend time together, to ride on his bike, to see the city. Yuri accepted, but all he wanted was to stay in his hotel room and rest. The past four months had sapped him of any energy. He skated, he danced, he functioned, but he felt like a puppet, moved by the dispassionate hand of habit.

He was just so tired. No matter how early he turned in for the night, he just didn’t seem to get enough sleep. Some days he wondered why the fuck he was even bothering to torment himself. What was the point in any of this.

Then he would remember the pile of bills waiting to be paid, and he crawled out of his bed, following the sound of Lilia’s sharp voice.

Otabek was standing in the lobby, leather jacket and sunglasses dangling from the neck of his t-shirt. His face was set in his trademark impassive expression, but when he spotted Yuri his lips moved into a barely there smile that made something stir inside him. It was like the slightest of shock waves, but in the stillness of his tiredness it felt almost overwhelming, and Yuri faltered in his tracks.

 

They spent most of the day wandering around Boston. Yuri barely registered anything. He was too tired, worn out like old skate laces, frayed on the edges and everywhere in between. But at the same time he didn’t want to go back to his hotel room. Beka was here, warm and solid, sitting on the bike in front of him. And if Yuri leaned forward he could smell his shampoo, along with a whiff of cologne.

It made his stomach twist.

But it was also pleasant. It was an undercurrent of warmth and want that was different. It didn’t crawl under his skin with a promise of gagged noises and harsh, uncaring fingers _everywhere._ It was like the rush of adrenaline before a quad. It tingled inside him and made him want to stretch this moment eternally. The wind whipping at his neck. The rumble of the engine underneath him. Otabek.

He was tired. He was drained. But he didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Yuri basked in Beka’s warmth, and for a little while there was no bile lingering on his tongue.

 

 

VI.

He left Boston with a silver medal, and something swelling in his chest.  The off season began with spring rains washing across his windows, and Yuri finally found time to rest. He was still at Lilia’s, slowly going through his days and waking up every morning to find another piece of the weariness he had felt falling off him.

It was getting easier to breathe. And when Otabek announced he was planning a week long trip to Russia, Yuri felt almost lightweight.

 

 

VII.

They were in Moscow. Yuri was staying at his Grandfather’s and he had eaten his yearly fill of pirozhki, every day bringing a paper bag full of them for Beka to eat while they strolled the large streets of the Russian capital, for once relying on their feet rather than speeding through on a bike.

They had enough time to take it slow, Beka had said. And maybe he had been referring to something else, but Yuri chose to interpret it this way.

His lips had been on Otabek’s that very first evening.

His heart was threatening to burst through his ribcage, so fast it beat. And when he pressed his palm to Beka’s chest, he felt an echo of his heartbeats. Yuri kissed him again. And again.

It was perfect. It was new, but so right, like the way skate blades sliced the ice or the chilly air whipped his hair during a spin. It was like winning the GPF, only better, warmer. There were no fears. Just the fast fast thrumming of their hearts as their hands linked and Yuri learned the sound of Otabek’s breathing, the smell of his skin underneath the aftershave.

It was perfect, and for the first time in a very long time Yuri was happy.

It was over too soon.

 

 

VIII.

The first week of July Yuri boarded a plane for Almaty. Lilia was not happy, but Yuri hadn’t paid her much attention anyway. It had been _weeks_ since he had last seen Beka.

He was done waiting.

 

 

IX.

He was flying off the handle. And yet it was fucking perfect. There was the sticky heat of summer clinging to his clothes. There were the long long streaks of sunlight burning through his windows, and Beka’s warm body next to his own, his mouth trailing paths down Yuri’s skin. He was spending a fortnight in Almaty and even the ice seemed brighter there. Everything was lit up, alive in ways he could not fully describe. And it was the fucking best sensation.

There were no dark corners lurking on the edge of his vision. No slithering coils of memory tangling in his hair and pulling until he gagged on the phantom taste of cum on his tongue. There were no heaves of disgust rising up his gullet. He was free. At last he was free of himself, and everything he was. He was a meteor and he was burning, he was crashing, he was flying off the handle and it was so good he wished he never would stop.

And why should he?

What was there to stop him? What obstacles were there than Yuri could not jump across? He was a fucking prodigy after all. He could quad jump across any barrier in front of him. And be the fuckiong embodiment of grace and beauty as Lilia demanded. He could do anything.

He was on top of the world.

It was a fortnight, but it felt like an endless summer. It was days blending into a seamless tangle of bodies, of sweat, of kisses, of dry sunkissed air and never never stopping. It was the fucking best he had ever felt in his whole sixteen years of life. And he couldn’t give a fuck if it would end, if it would disappear, because there was no future, no time. There was only the now, and the euphoria of being happy.

So fucking happy he felt the urge to scream at the top of his lungs.

Because he was in Almaty, he was with Beka, and everything was _perfect._

 

 

X.

It was the last weekend in Almaty, and Yuri was becoming aware of how within the next forty-eight hours he was going to get into a plane and fly back to Saint Petersburg. That the recycled air inside the airplane was not going to be the dry air of the Kazakh summer. It was not going to smell like Beka’s aftershave.

He was leaving.

And there was something tangling at the bottom of his gullet. It tasted like bile. Because Yuri was a fucking meteor, but he was about to crash, wasn’t he?

 

 

XI.

He was back in Saint Petersburg. It was August, the white nights had been swallowed by the rapidly shortening days, and Otabek had come to visit him for a weekend. They hadn’t seen each other since he had left Almaty, and in the long weeks in between a thunderstorm had simmered inside Yuri.

Beka’s presence didn’t make it any better.

Because in spite of having his boyfriend there with him, there were bolts of lightning flashing in Yuri’s veins. And he wished he could claw his way out of his skin, to burst out of the constraints of his own flesh. Because everything was too much, and at the same time it was not enough.

Otabek kept eyeing him with a pensive expression that grew more lingering with each passing day. And Yuri fretted about it. He knew it couldn’t be anything good. He wondered if Otabek could at last see the ghost touches that were still on his skin, if he could taste the lingering echoes of the cum he had swallowed. Of the fingers that had been thrust in his mouth, of tongues wetly pushing against his own. Did Otabek see Yuri for the disgusting _thing_ he was capable of reducing himself too. And willingly too.

Did he feel it?

Did he know?

Could he read the impressions in his mind? The countless times he had allowed - _wanted_ , he had wanted, yes - to be fucked like a whore? To be used by some nameless stranger and discarded just like that? Of all the sore mornings when he had felt proud of being grown enough, pretty enough, when he had looked at his reflection in the mirror and revelled in the teeth marks on his skin.

Could Beka see that for the disgust he had for himself there was a part of him that _enjoyed_ being used like that? That when the bubbling of want need energy began bursting through him there was no stopping himself. That it felt like being on top of the world and flipping it off. That everything was too much but never nearly enough.

Did Beka know? Could Beka feel it?

Yuri tried to act like himself, but who was he anyway?

It was like his own perception of self slipped off him sometimes, and he was left observing his own life like a spectator. Who was Yuri Plisetsky? The Fairy, the Punk, the Whore? All of them? None of them?

He was disgusting. Of that there was no debate, at least. But he never said that out loud. It was bad enough to see himself in that light. To hear others - to hear _Beka_ \- confirm it would be too much.

The weekend ended and Otabek caught a plane for Almaty, brown eyes still looking at him, dissecting him, pinning his wings on a cork-board and watching his muscles twitch. He boarded the plane without saying anything about it. Without voicing whatever it was that he saw.

And Yuri took a cab to Lilia’s, dropped on top of his bed still fully dressed, and stared at the ceiling.

He didn’t sleep that night.

 

 

XII.

It had been weeks since he had last slept well. Whenever his body succumbed to exhaustion it would be only to find his dreams plagued by images he didn’t want to _see._ He wanted to burn them out of his brain, to rip the synapses apart, and never ever see them again. He wanted to rest. He wanted to stop feeling like he was jumping a quad he knew he would not land. But gravity seemed to have stopped working for him, and he was suspended there, in mid motion, waiting for something to change.

Nothing did.

 

August drew to an end, the season began to crawl closer, and Yuri was still stuck.

Some days he felt like ripping his hair out. Some days he pulled hard enough and there were blond strands left in his fists.

 

 

XIII.

September began and Yuri had enough of it all. He decided to tell Otabek everything. It was easier this way. What was the point in torturing himself, in _hoping_ his boyfriend never found out. It was only a matter of time before Beka would read all the filth hidden by his soldier eyes. Waiting for the inevitable meant prolonging the agony. And Yuri was just tired.

They were skyping late at night, Yuri’s face glaring back at himself from the small display in the corner, bathed in the unnatural light of his laptop screen. Everything else was dark in his room. And maybe this made it easier to cross this bridge and blow it up into a fucking million pieces along with this relationship.

It hurt somewhere in his chest, but it was a dull thing.

Yuri didn’t really care about much lately, and the fuzzy shroud which covered everything was oddly comforting. It made his voice keep the same monotone cadence as he recounted the things he had done almost clinically. He could still feel taste smell all of them, he could recall with picture perfect clarity every encounter even the ones when he had been too drunk too care. He was disgusting,

It was better to just get it over with. Then he could finally curl in his bed and lose himself to the bliss of numbness.

Otabek just listened. His stoic expression unwavering, and if it hadn’t been for the occasional twitch of his jaw Yuri might have thought the image had frozen. But no, Beka was there and he listened to him, silently.

And Yuri waited for the disgust to appear on his face.

 

It didn’t come.

 

 

XIV.

“Yura, I think you need help.” Otabek told him gently. Yuri just blinked, mouth slightly agape.

"Help?"

"Yes."

 

 

XV.

Twelve months later it’s summer again. Yuri is seventeen years old, takes two pills in the morning and one before sleep, and his boyfriend has moved to Saint Petersburg to train under his coach. It’s a far cry from perfect. But it’s better. And right now he is standing in the middle of a club, swaying to the music which blares from the loudspeakers. He’s dancing with all he has, but his eyes never leave the DJ booth. Otabek is there, and this, this music, these mixes are all for him.

It’s been a year since that skype call, many things had changed. But Yuri dares to hope. For the first time in his life he’s not soaring high only to crash at a breakneck speed on the ground. He’s calm. Steady.

For the first time Yuri has reason to hope.

Otabek gives him a small smile.

 

Yuri grins back.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this fic was quite a ride. Many thanks to the artist I was paired up with, but also to all my mutuals who listened to my rants as this fic came to be (you know who you are!)
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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